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Along the Mississippi, BVMs founded schools at 13 locations from Minnesota to Mississippi. From the little Liffey running through Dublin to Philadelphia 's Delaware, a sizable river, to the Ohio, a big river, and down the Ohio to the Mississippi, Margaret Mann, one of the BVM founders, had traveled. What an impression the enormous expanse of water at St. Louis must have made! Margaret spent the rest of her life on the Mississippi —as did many BVMs. Dubuque Arriving in Dubuque in 1843, the sisters opened St. Mary School downtown near the cathedral. Clarke College is a continuation of that school. At first St. Mary had day and boarding pupils, but in 1846 the boarders moved with the novices to St. Joseph Prairie, away from Dubuque with its contentious factions in the parish and its hard-drinking boatmen and miners on the streets. When the building on the Prairie became too crowded with both boarders and novices, the students moved in 1859 back into the city. St. Joseph Academy remained 100 years until Wahlert, a diocesan high school, opened. When St. Joseph Academy grew too large in 1880, the sisters moved the boarding school two miles from Dubuque to a muddy hillside riddled with deserted mineshafts. This became the verdant campus of Mount St. Joseph Academy, later Clarke College. All this time the grade school near the cathedral continued until 1976 when the parish had changed so that there were hardly any children. By then it had the same name as the cathedral, St. Raphael. BVMs conducted two other grade schools in Dubuque. St. Patrick had been a boys' school, but when the sisters took over in 1950 it was coed. BVMs took over St. Anthony school in 1917 while living at Clarke, about a mile away. It served as a lab school for Clarke's education department. It continues, though without BVMs. Davenport BVMs first ventured out of Dubuque in 1844 downriver to Davenport, still part of the Dubuque diocese. St. Philomena Academy opened with good prospects, but soon afterward the Davenport population dropped rapidly. The school lasted only three years under many hardships. In 1854, a railroad bridge crossed the Mississippi from Rock Island, and Davenport 's population shot up as it became the gateway to Chicago for the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase. The next year St. Anthony Parish school opened near where St. Philomena had been and prospered. In time the sisters there commuted to teach in two new parishes, St. Marguerite for French speakers and St. Kunegunda for Germans. BVMs also taught at St. Paul the Apostle and Sacred Heart which became the cathedral parish when Davenport was named a diocese in 1881. In 1859, BVM Margaret Mann led a group to open Immaculate Conception Academy on donated land two miles from church, a mile from the city, and a quarter mile from a well. The sisters struggled along for two years at what Father Donaghoe called “Poverty Point” until he bought a big house in the city. Enrollment grew so fast that the whole house became living quarters and the barn was turned into classrooms. In five years the building was sold to purchase the Hill Mansion, the nucleus around which a big school grew. Immaculate Conception Academy functioned almost as a second Motherhouse in the early days. The old Motherhouse was ten miles outside Dubuque. ICA was near railroad lines east and west as well as the river with steamboats north and south. Father Donaghoe liked to stay there while he still could travel. Both railroad and river brought many boarders to ICA, particularly from the South. Wealthy southerners summered in comparatively cool Davenport. Men hunted or fished while their families stayed in the luxurious LeClaire Hotel. Many among them left their daughters at ICA. In 1958 the diocese opened Assumption central high school. ICA had lasted 99 years. Potosi In 1845, just a year after going to Davenport, the sisters opened a school in Potosi, Wis., which also was part of the Dubuque diocese, but in three years boundaries changed and the BVMs left. Burlington In 1857, BVMs took charge of Our Lady of Lourdes School in Burlington, Iowa. In 1892 Our Lady of Lourdes added a girls' academy. This became St. Paul High School (named for the parish) in 1925 and was absorbed into Notre Dame Central High School in 1988. St. John and St. Patrick were ancillary elementary schools where sisters commuted to teach for a few years in the 19th century. Muscatine Muscatine was one of many places Fr. Samuel Mazzuchelli founded a parish and designed the church, this one named St. Mathias to honor Bishop Loras. The town was very anti-Catholic when in 1862 BVMs came. The school closed as part of a diocesan reorganization in 1992. McGregor A reorganization of BVM schools in 1894 closed many boarding schools as transportation improved. One was St. Mary's in McGregor which had opened in 1868. One sister is buried there; BVMs intended to move her body to Mount Carmel, but the people asked to keep “our sister.” Today, Mary McCauley, BVM (Mercedie) is pastoral administrator of this parish and two others in Northeast Iowa. Clinton BVMs who came to Lyons (later Clinton), Iowa to teach at St. Boniface parish school in 1871, immediately contacted Mount Carmel about the most impressive building in town. The Lyons Female College, a big red brick building on a high hill, was topped by a large square “lookout” such as were common in river ports and that was topped by a round cupola. This one, with its commanding view of the town, seemed to have been built to draw the eye. The girls' boarding school had failed in 1858 and the property was purchased by the Presbyterian synod as a possible seminary. Now it was for sale again. BVMs bought it and opened Our Lady of Angels Academy in 1872. The tower became a cherished landmark for students, girls from minims through high school, who could see it as they approached—many of them from Chicago, as Clinton is on the tip of Iowa 's nose where it nudges into Illinois. The school closed in 1966 as the age of boarding schools ended. Meanwhile 112 graduates had become BVMs, and their classmates are among the most devoted BVM alumnae. Rock Island/Quad Cities At times ICA housed sisters who took a ferry to Rock Island each day to teach at St. Joseph Parish where in 1884 they opened a school. Rock Island, a riverport with several railroads and an army base, throve, and so did St. Joseph School. In 1920, a high school opened with even more BVMs. In 1948, Alleman, a diocesan central high school, serving the Illinois Quad Cities opened. Sixteen years later, St. Joseph School consolidated with Sacred Heart and St. Pius X as Jordan Catholic School. Sacred Heart had been the east end of St. Joseph Parish. BVMs opened a grade school there in 1925 that continued till the 1974 consolidation. Some of them still live in the convent and work in Sacred Heart Parish. Farther east, BVMs taught elementary grades at St. Mary's in Moline from 1884 to 1904 and at St. Anne in East Moline from 1925 to 2005. The half dozen BVMs still in the Illinois Quad Cities do parish and volunteer work. St. Louis The 1906 San Francisco earthquake displaced so many St. Brigid parishioners, that Mother Mary Cecilia Dougherty withdrew five of the 15 sisters there. It was a lucky moment for Father H. Bronsgeest, SJ to ask for sisters to open a school at St. Francis Xavier Parish near St. Louis University. When the sisters arrived August 29, 1906, he had bought and renovated a building for a school and rented but not furnished a house for a convent. They managed. In 1927, a new grade school was built. Four years later Xavier High School opened in a mansion bought cheap at the depth of the Depression. The students had use of the university gymnasium, pool, science labs, and auditorium. Not the library; the girls came at specified times and were segregated from male students, but that was hard to do in a library. After three years Xavier was noted for its scholastic standards and had a waiting list for students Entertainment was big at Xavier: Father Daniel A. Lord, SJ used to write, produce, and play piano for musicals there through the '40s. By 1950 a new high school was being built with its own labs, etc. and with a convent on the top floor. By 1974, enrollment declined drastically. Competing high schools had opened in the outer city, and the university neighborhood had grown more dangerous. Even alumnae hesitated to send their daughters there. The high school building was sold in the spring of 1976 to St. Louis University which uses the building for speech and drama classes. Soon the little parish grade school closed, too, but BVMs still minister in St. Louis. For 23 years, BVMs also taught at St. Timothy elementary school. Memphis In the 1930s, Mother Mary Gervase Tuffy was negotiating to open a school in China but put the project on hold when the Japanese army arrived. She turned to the South—almost as foreign—and asked for volunteers for a Black school in Memphis. About 600 BVMs responded. August 18, 1937 two sisters arrived to look over the Edna Oliver Home, formerly a hospital, which Father Bertrand, OFM had proposed as school and convent. Congregational leaders approved, and four BVMs became the initial faculty. Sisters of Charity of Nazareth at St. Peter's Orphanage gave furniture for the third floor convent and helped arrange it. Fr. Bertrand obtained secondhand furnishings for St. Augustine School on the first two floors. The sisters met much hostility from Tennesseeans who disapproved their teaching Black children. In November, the NCWC (now the USCCB) met in Memphis. Children from the parochial schools were invited to sing, but some people objected to Black children joining in. The bishop of Nashville said, “Include them.” They sang separated from the other children. The school had opened with about 100 children in eight grades. In 1938, it had 200, and opened first year high school. By 1943, there were over 400. In the 1950s the high school was consolidated into Father Bertrand, a central Black Catholic high school, and Father Bertrand merged into Memphis Catholic, an integrated school. Today, BVMs remain in Memphis in diverse ministries. Clarksdale Clarksdale, Miss., is near Memphis. In 1947 two BVMs opened Immaculate Conception School, four grades in two rooms of Father O'Leary's house across the street from an all-Black housing project. Within months they moved to a separate building. The school kept expanding. There were seven grades in 1951, nine in '54, 12 in '56. The high school was accredited in 1958. The late '60s saw an expanded curriculum and a varied faculty—BVMs, other congregations, lay volunteers. When BVMs left the Clarksdale school, Sinsinsawa Dominicans already there took charge. BVMs still live in Clarksdale and teach in nearby Jonestown. St. Paul When Fr. Joseph Cretin, a good friend to the BVMs, became first bishop of the new diocese of St. Paul, Minn., in 1850, he asked for sisters but BVMs were not going outside the Dubuque diocese yet. A century later they went to St. Paul. Our Lady of Peace High School opened in 1951 with 115 freshmen in what had been St. Luke grade school. (A larger church and school had been built in a more residential part of the parish.) The high school flourished, and an addition was built in 1953. Three years later saw a new convent for the increased faculty teaching over 900 girls—with a waiting list. The school's high standards were recognized by the business community. In the late '60s, there was no longer a waiting list because newer high schools could take the overflow. By 1970 enrollment began to decline; the OLP area had become entirely commercial. In June 1973, OLP closed as part of archdiocesan school reorganization. Three years later the building was bought by the William Mitchell College of Law—which now opens its doors for occasional alumnae gatherings. Now many BVMs lay buried in towns where living sisters no longer work, but the good work they did still bears fruit. Former students, sometimes thousands of miles from where they went to school, will accost someone they hear is a BVM on airplanes, at wakes, in restaurants, anywhere with inquiries and stories about their long-dead teachers. Children of former students do not always know where their mothers developed such devotion to the Blessed Virgin, good grammar and good music, but they hand on these lessons. That's what Margaret Mann had in mind. About the author: Mary A. Healey, BVM (Michael Edward) is a researcher; she lives at Wright Hall, Chicago. Return to Table of Contents. |
